Doug McIntyre: Arguing ourselves to death over guns

`Twelve dead, 58 injured. Hand-wringing. Finger-pointing. Grieving. And then, slowly but inevitably, forgetting. Until the next time. There's always a next time."

I wrote that on July 21 in the aftermath of James Eagan Holmes' unspeakable attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Too bad predicting the winner of bowl games or Powerball numbers isn't as easy as predicting horrific, senseless mass murders.

Unfortunately, in a heavily armed nation of 300 million-plus the only wild cards are when, where, who and how many.

This time it was the bucolic village of Newtown, Conn., Norman Rockwell's America, and the death toll was higher and the victims even younger.

Unbelievably young. Six- and 7-year-olds. "Why?" "How could anyone?" "We have to do something!" It's become a refrain.

"Before the bodies of 10 of the dead had even been removed from the movie theater, advocates and opponents of various causes rushed to the cameras, microphones and Twitter accounts to round up the usual suspects," I wrote in July.

And so it goes in December.

The same arguments over guns, video games, prayer in school and mental illness. More heated. More passionate. After all, this time we're talking about 20 little kids.

"This time we're serious!" say the politicians. They swear this time they're really going to do something about it.

Like what?

What can we do to stop a madman from gunning down children a few days before Christmas?

This much I do know. We'll never find a solution if we don't accept a grim reality: We will never live in a gun-free society. Not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, and not in your children's children's lifetimes.

Guns don't expire. They have a longer shelf life than Twinkies. With minimal maintenance, guns remain deadly for centuries.

Unless we send "The Gun Police" block-by-block, house-by-house with metal detectors to confiscate every gun in America, people will continue to be shot by crazed madmen.

And the American public will never grant that kind of power to the government. Just talk of new gun laws after Newtown sent gun sales through the roof and saw NRA membership increased by 8,000 a day.

So what do we do?

Go the other way? Do we arm everyone? Do we turn every kindergarten teacher into Mrs. Rambo?

Is that realistic? Is that the kind of country we want to live in? Do we have to have a real Kindergarten Cop?

This is not a problem with a simple solution or even a single solution. The wave of psycho-killers comes at the same time gun violence has dropped to its lowest level in decades. The facts are, despite perceptions, we are a less violent society than we were 20 years ago.

Which will be zero comfort to the grieving fathers and mothers of Connecticut.

But to make further progress we can't allow raw emotions to send us chasing pie-in-the-sky solutions and continue to argue endlessly over the culpability of the NRA, Hollywood, atheists or the mentally ill. Whatever we choose to do must start with an ugly truth - we can't stop every crazy or evil man who chooses death over life.

If we continue to divide ourselves into gun people and anti-gun people nothing will be done but more highfalutin rhetoric; more hand-wringing newspaper columns like this, more candlelight vigils and more heartbreaking piles of teddy bears left to console the inconsolable tears of shattered communities like Newtown, Aurora, Littleton, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Granada Hills, Seal Beach ...